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Spartan Battle Armour
"Inefficiency leads to defeat. Humanity is inefficient. Remove the inefficiency to remove the defeat." :- Author unknown Background "Other people looked at the Spartan and saw that it was too advanced for a human to control. I looked at it and saw that the human brain was too primitive to control it." :- Nicolaus Alessandri In 1968, a now defunct company known as Hanno Laboratories conducted a test. Like several others, the company had sought to create the ultimate fusion of man and machine; a battlesuit. Millions of cedi were expended in the construction of the "perfect" cybernetic body, a mechanical construct that would be faster, stronger, better than any human (or any other battlesuit, for that matter) in existence. It would be controlled by a human brain to be provided by a volunteer, removed from its fragile organic shell and wired up to its new synthetic body. But when the company activated its new creation (dubbed the Spartan, in honour of the ancient Greek city state), the test went spectacularly wrong when the battlesuit went completely berserk, leading to the complete destruction of Hanno's corporate facility and the death of all but one of its employees, a junior researcher by the name of Nicolaus Alessandri. Such disastrous accidents were not at all uncommon with many other early battlesuits, but when a Legion Security team was dispatched to recover what they could of Hanno's research, it was soon found that the Spartan had a fatal flaw, one that would not be easily fixed. Testing and analysis of the recovered battlesuit soon led to the discovery that the Spartan was incredibly advanced, well in advance of anything other companies had achieved. However, it was also found to be an extremely convoluted and overly intricate design, particularly where its interface was concerned. Therein lay the problem; the Spartan was simply far too complex too handle; its feedback was overwhelming, well beyond what a human mind could possibly handle. Worse still, the complicated nature of the design, coupled with the loss of the original designer's notes, meant that it could potentially take years, if not decades to sort out the problems that plagued it. Unless that could be achieved, however, it was useless; any controlling mind, if it didn't go insane, would burn out within hours. The Spartan prototype would have been shelved, if Alessandri had not proposed a solution. While far from the most optimal, could nevertheless salvage an excellent battlesuit that would have otherwise gone to waste, while avoiding the massive expenditure that any attempt to fix the flaws in the design would undoubtedly incur. With this, work began on retooling the Spartan Battlesuit. The next year, the Spartan Mark II performed excellently in trials, this time controlled by a brain that had been surgically modified almost beyond recognisability, assisted by an artificial intelligence unit. The idea had succeeded; the Syndicate had the perfect battlesuit, controlled by a mind completely removed from any semblance of humanity. Thanks to Alessandri, Legion Security now has in its possession a powerful weapon. The Spartan is heavily armoured and well constructed, able to resist impacts from even anti-tank weaponry. At the same time, its robotic joints give it immense strength and agility; the Spartan is surprisingly nimble for its size, and its hydraulic actuators are powerful enough that they can even be used to climb up buildings, despite the battlesuit's not inconsiderable weight. It is this last quality that is particularly useful to the Spartan's current assigned role; while the Spartans have not yet seen any deployments, Legion Security intends for them to be employed as snipers and ambushers. From their vantage points at the tops of buildings, Spartans can make full use of their excellent sensor suite to pick out targets, before engaging them from extreme range with powerful 40mm canister rifles. Here, the Spartan's almost robotic nature proves to have other advantages; it is immune to fatigue, and has no qualms with staying completely still for days until a target presents itself. Between the inhuman patience and unerring accuracy of the controlling mind and the range and power of the canister rifle, it is a safe bet that a target is good as dead once a Spartan has it within its crosshairs. Category:Units